Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) [Paperback]

Kathleen Flenniken (Author)

Book Description

Series: Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry | Publication Date: September 1, 2006

She “became famous, finally, to herself,” Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken’s first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here “a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren’t all of us / waiting to be discovered?”

 

The poet’s answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Flenniken's understated debut, winner of the Prarie Schooner Book Prize, weaves together two seemingly antithetical themes: the comic indignations and attractions of minor celebrities, and the everyday joys and sorrows of family life. A love of plainspoken language informs these ironically modest, lines: "I'm no smarter than Miss Scarlet in her// tawdry side-slit dress," she writes, assuming the voice of Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue. Later poems consider the lives of somewhat famous figures, such as story writer Shirley Jackson and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; their troubles sit uneasily beside Flenniken's heartfelt portraits of her ailing, and now deceased, mother. Ordinariness-our need for it, and our frustrations with it-becomes Flenniken's signature subject: the quietest evenings "make you what you are." Flenniken sometimes errs on the side of modesty, making her speech consistently trustworthy but rarely elevated or exciting. She has fashioned a poetry comfortable with self-imposed limits: "Pray to the neighbor's dog," she urges, "who finally learned to live on a chain." She still finds herself searching after mysteries, in board games, novels, and her own life, lauding "this idea that you could step out of your life/ unafraid, with no worldly need but to find who done it."
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Review

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry "What emerges from the poems, taken as a group and as a loose narrative, is a familiar and mundane persona that could correspond to that of many middle-class American female poets... [B]ut this life is, beautifully and completely, transformed into art... [I]t is rare to come across a poet of familiar contemporary experience like Kathleen Flenniken, whose imaginative, convincing tropes, sense of rhythm and sound, sharp intellect, narrative instinct, and resistance to cliche transform that experience into art so compelling that it makes us wonder how have we come to doubt it could be done? That would take us back to the rest of the books Left on the Shelf. Given that Famous was among them, I will keep returning." Bloomsbury Review "There's a consistency of voice and diction in Famous that satisfies and a carefully rendered emotional core to the poems, which quietly surprises."--Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Different Hours "There's a winning surface modesty here: it isn't Abraham Lincoln who merits the poem, but his oft-maligned wife; not Edna St. Vincent Millay, but her stay-at-home husband; not the Taj Mahal, but the everyday International House of Pancakes. Still, in Flenniken's hands, these occasions rise toward urgent news--as when, in 'Shampoo,' the memory of a mother's declining health soulfully becomes one with the headline about a submarine's sinking--until the least most of us are transformed, poem by poem, into the famous."--Albert Goldbarth, author of Saving Lives and Budget Travel through Space and Time "Unpretentious, self-effacing, earthy, funny, and wise."--Peggy Shumaker, author of Blaze "Exploring the external trappings of contemporary life as well as the internal cadences of a mind that wants at once to be 'shocking and irresistible,' Kathleen Flenniken takes us into the slipstreams of fame, where our daily dramas play themselves out in the 'wild uncoded rhythms' of the imagination."--Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road

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Product Details

• Paperback: 76 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803269242
• ISBN-13: 978-0803269248
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waiting to be discovered, January 8, 2007

By 

Nancy Pagh (Bellingham, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)

Kathleen Flenniken's Famous has been one of my favorite reads in poetry this year. Her attention to images, phrases, the murmurs of gorgeous language and life, arrested me. In the poem "Sotto Voce" she writes "Aren't all of us / waiting to be discovered?" This book felt like a peeling and peeling back, moving deeper into the discovery of oneself, discoveries of what distinguishes and connects us to strangers, to intimate others. Several of my favorite poems explored marriage in unexpected, lush, and provocative ways. The poem "What I Saw" describes viewing a swimmer emerge from a lake, a sympathetic shiver from the poem's speaker. It concludes: "She turned / her back but didn't wait to peel away / her seal-black suit and what I saw / was ampleness and white, the beauty / of the world in late September. / Sometimes when I think of it I stare. / Sometimes she is me and I am her." I felt so much the same in reading Famous, drawn to this book's ample beauty.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Proud Debut, September 17, 2006

By 

P. Pereira (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)

Kathleen Flenniken's wonderful debut, Famous, explores modern life, history, work & family, and asks what it means for us to be famous, remembered, important to another person, or, finally, to ourselves. Using humor, "Nature abhors a vacuum/but God loves a good vacuuming." ("It's Not You, It's Me") as well as piercing insight: " the boy who has drifted an entire lifetime/into their oncoming lane." ("Gil's Story"), Flenniken balances skilled craftsmanship with riveting story-telling. In "To Ease My Mind" Flenniken takes on the persona of Mary Todd Lincoln amid Civil War carnage, finding her consolation in kidskin gloves and emboidery so fine "one might believe a fairy tatted them. I might need box upon box of them/to tell me who I am." -- I find this poem a dead-on commentary on the waste and vanity of contemporary America at war. In "If We Could Live Here," Flenniken is plane passenger on take-off: "We are split by an aisle, a soon to be/fracture in the fuselage," and imagines what life would be like if we always lived in that moment before " . . . engines screaming, full throttle towards heaven -- /all the daily baggage/would fall away . . ." Winner of the Prairie Schooner book prize. Highly recommended. Congratulations, Kathleen!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plain Lovely, October 20, 2009

By 

Dennis Caswell (Woodinville, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)

Kathleen Flenniken's voice is gentle and open-hearted but never cloying or sappy, intelligent but never pretentious, funny and playful but never scornful, and her diction and tone are wonderfully controlled and free of false steps and sour notes. The quiet, understated grace in poem after poem proves that modesty really is a virtue, which makes the book's title all the more amusing (especially considering the way the cover design resembles a Penguin Classic). For all its modesty, though, the material is wide-ranging: from parental devotion (describing a third-grade recorder concert, she writes "By 'Go Tell Aunt Rhodie,' the audience / is moved by their sheer pretty-goodness") to the delicious safety of reading about heroes without having to be one ("... most of us / decide to remain minor characters / like the quixotic neighbor growing / bonsai sequoias, ...") to ennui ("These evenings, thin as glass / and slipping just as slowly downhill. // They're what make you what you are. / Not those engraved occasions, white-tie audiences, / Everybody raise a toast, not the great seduction scene, / remarking on the perfect height of the desk,"), and on through sex, death, grief, and the International House of Pancakes. There's nothing showy or flashy here, just the kind of warm, insightful honesty that you hope for from a close friend.